Sustainable Convictions

WASHINGTON, DC – Achieving a more sustainable world presupposes a worldview that considers well-being not only in terms of income, but also in terms of human security and opportunities for every person to thrive. It is worth considering what the world would look like from such a perspective.

For starters, it would be a world in which people live free from conflict over land, water, and space, and that ensures food security for the 739 million people who are hungry or malnourished today. Such a world would preserve the 20,000 species of animals and plants that face extinction, understanding their power to heal us physically and spiritually. It would draw us back from the brink of unstoppable global warming and its consequences for coastal communities, weather patterns, and, in some regions, habitability. It would protect sites of extraordinary natural beauty and inspiration. And, for future generations, it would be a world that is more sustainable than ours.

Many people consider this idealistic. But economic growth enables people to improve their lives. It alters the political economy of decision-making, creating space for new ideas to thrive. And one of those ideas is that growth is unsustainable in the long run unless it is inclusive and green.

We need to break the myth that greener growth is more costly. Smart policy can help us to overcome short-run constraints, deeply entrenched behaviors, and social norms, and to develop innovative financing instruments that change incentives. A recent report by the World Bank makes the case for cleaner, greener, and more inclusive growth models. At the same time, the Equator Principles offer companies a framework for considering the environmental and social risks of their investments.

Similarly, we need to use more comprehensive wealth accounts as a reference point for decision-making. Countries have long used national income accounts, with GDP as the main indicator, to describe economic performance. A more accurate portrait of the wealth of nations must account not only for income, but also for natural and social assets.

Such indicators would enable decision makers to consider the longer-term impact of behavior that might deplete or build assets and impede or establish a more sustainable pattern of development. New tools such as Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystems, or WAVES, enable increasingly robust ecosystem accounting – an approach endorsed by 62 countries, more than 90 private companies, and 17 civil-society and international organizations at the Rio+20 summit in June.

We must also protect our oceans, which are the source of 16% of the global population’s animal protein intake. Only a small fraction of species that live in oceans have been discovered and documented. The potential value of ocean life for medicine, the economy, and our climate is unknown. Yet ocean bio-systems are under threat from acidification, pollution, and over-exploitation.

Where oceans meet the shore, degradation of mangroves and grasslands jeopardizes our coastal communities. With less than 1% of ocean space protected, and only a small fraction affected by well-considered government policies or international treaties, opportunities abound to improve the oceans’ health. The Global Partnership for Oceans is a promising new alliance of more than 100 government and international institutions, civil-society organizations, and private companies seeking to address threats to ocean health, resilience, and productivity.

Likewise, we must recognize that the sky is (at) the limit. After the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, world leaders hoped to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. They recognized the dramatic implications that even this amount of warming would have for sea levels, freshwater supplies, agriculture, extreme weather events, public health, and the planet’s flora and fauna. We now appear to be on track for four-degree warming, with almost unimaginable consequences.

The need for concerted action to limit greenhouse-gas emissions is beyond doubt. While the politics of international agreements plays out, we need to take action now. More thoughtful urban planning, more efficient transport systems, better management of forests, agricultural techniques that help to sequester carbon, cleaner and more affordable energy, and appropriate pricing of dirty fuels can all move us in the right direction. Climate Funds such as the Climate Investment Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the recently created Green Climate Fund deserve support as major vehicles for developing workable solutions.

Above all, we must use goals to focus policy. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals set ambitious targets for lowering poverty, improving health and nutrition, expanding education, increasing gender equality, and ensuring environmental sustainability. Those targets have served as a useful rallying call. As the global community develops Sustainable Development Goals to complement the MDGs, we need a robust public debate on the lessons learned and the financing mechanisms used to meet the targets.

Once we set goals, we need reliable information systems to assess progress toward achieving them. The information needed to understand social, environmental, and economic trends is generally produced by government statistics offices. But, even as the urgency of being able to understand trends and act in real time is increasing, many governments face significant gaps in their ability to produce and analyze information. Massive investments will be needed to strengthen governments’ capacity to collect timely, relevant, and high-quality data; to analyze information; and to present it to policymakers in ways that allow them to grasp and tackle the major challenges to sustainability.

“Think globally, act locally” has long been a useful rallying call for the health of the planet. But the magnitude of the problems that we face also compels us to act globally. New tools for economic modeling, natural-wealth accounting, and investment decision-making can move us forward. Action now to build smarter cities and protect oceans, air, and forests will shape the trajectory of our changing climate. As the agreements reached at Rio+20 are implemented, the global community should resolve to take even bolder action in the next 20 years – at the local, national, and international levels – to foster sustainability.

This column was produced within the framework of the EC-funded “V4Aid” project. The views expressed do not necessarily represent the view of the EU.

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There's a reason why the Kyoto Protocol systematically fails is due to the hight cost of monitoring a "common resource" market. This issue of high transaction costs of monitoring is the obstacle and until the countries involved put their focus on reducing transaction costs instead of focusing on limiting their emissions, the Protocol will continue to fail as it tries to solve an economic problem in a non-economic fashion. Read more

Undoubtedly the importance of accurately measuring the value of natural resources has been widely ignored, but is there not a possibility that by placing monetary value on these assets there’s a chance of them being exploited (more than they are already- quick fix for poverty alleviation?). With the well-recognised link between natural asset rich countries and an inability to overcome economic problems would there not be a chance that the issue could be accentuated? Read more

Might it be possible to replace economic growth with economic improvement, actually making things better instead of making more things? I realize it's idealistic and that the outlines of such a transition are quite fuzzy but some in economics and business are thinking about what a "betterness" economy might ultimately look like. And the sooner we can kill GDP as an indicator, the smarter we'll be. Read more

This is an uplifting review article with beautiful and seemingly achievable goals.And we heard similar comprehensive speeches, see articles publications but despite all this there is no sign of any change in the direction humanity is moving.We are still missing something and it is motivation.In order to start true, wholesome and fundamental changes people need to be motivated.And as we learnt from our history negative motivation with force or trickery does not work, cannot create a sustainable system. Even the present western system we consider "democratic and free" is based on the trickery of brainwashing politics and marketing, only designed to serve a small minority on the expense of everybody else.Thus we need to find a positive motivation for the whole of humanity, not only for 1% or for 99% but for the 100%.Such a positive motivation can only come through a global, comprehensive, integral education program, starting at the youngest age groups, but involving the whole population trough courses, mass media coverage, basically through a total environment change adjusting people's perception about the reality we live in, about our own human nature, what role we are supposed to fulfill in this intricate, and sensitive, interdependent living, natural system we exist in.As the article suggest we already have all the necessary scientific information, data, but finally we have to take on the responsibility to collect all this together and form a unified curriculum that can achieve its goal of positively motivating humanity to start building a more sustainable future, abandoning the present self calculating, fragmented profit oriented, self consuming attitude substituted mutual, cooperative truly global one. Read more

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